Taking stock of Part II

This chapter takes stock of what was discussed in Part II of this book. It discusses that undesirable but unremovable migrants have increasingly emerged as a structural feature of contemporary migration governance and that their existence is rooted in broader criminal law and security agendas. While often introduced with different objectives in mind, such measures have had the unintended - and perhaps initially unforeseen - effect of creating a growing population of non-citizens who, once convicted, could not be removed. It argues that law and policy makers repeatedly face the apparently ‘new’ challenge of undesirable but unremovable migrants but respond with the same limited set of imperfect responses that their predecessors had already tested out decades before.